Storyteller

Anya made up a story this week. It goes like this:

"Mummy said 'Help, help! And Daddy came back."

She's told this tale half a dozen times over the last few days, and to the best of our knowledge it's not relating an event that actually took place. But to get all Northrop Frye on you, it does pretty well conform to that theory (I can't remember whose) that all plots boil down to one basic story: "The family is divided; the family is united."

She's also written a couple of songs, which similarly dwell on classic themes. Her favourite one goes:

"I lost a flower..."

The tune, in a C major scale, has G on "I", G up one octave on "lost a", and E up one octave on "flower". Loss, beauty, and memory: what more do you need in a classic song? The other one is more of a party tune:

"Splish! Splash! Having a bath!"

The tune here is C for "Splish", the A below it for "Splash", the G below that for "having a" and the E below that for "bath".

Now I realise this is all utterly silly. But I do think it's a beautiful moment when a child goes from reading stories to making up her own. And though this sort of archetypal theory of literature is very out of favour these days (and very susceptible to that fallacy where you can describe anything with the same concepts if you define your terms broadly enough) I think it's pretty fascinating that she has hit on some classic themes.

And, most of all -- it's very, very, sweet!

Attack of the foam monster!

Anya up to this point has been absolutely fearless. I don't mean that figuratively, either: until just a few days ago, I would say that we'd never really seen her scared of anything.

Certainly she's been upset, or angry, or sore on occasions, and a couple of times she's had what look like night terrors: that middle-of-the-night, still-asleep yelling fit that seems to subside as the sleeper wakes.

She also understands the terms 'scary' and 'scared' and likes to use them, though you can tell from the context that she understands them more as synonyms to 'run away' or 'may bite' and thinks of it all as quite a fun concept --missing the essential dread involved in the whole idea of fear.

Well that changed this week. Kate ran her a big bath with lots of bubbles, because bubbles are fun, right? Not so: the bubble mountain was so huge that a piece broke off and perched on the edge of the bath, wobbling. I think you can appreciate that this was utterly terrifying, and Anya became quite hysterical with fear. The next night we tried a bath with only a smaller quantity of bubbles but she was still desperate to escape; only last night, with bubble-free bathwater, were we able to get her to just sit down and enjoy herself.

I suppose this is part and parcel of her showing other signs of imagination, such as telling stories. Fear is all about imagination: it's really just our response to a plausible story we tell ourselves that involves pain and suffering. So I'm glad it's only the foam monster that's scaring her.

Update: Actually, there is one other thing she's scared of. A few times while we were in Fiji she woke up in the night upset, saying "cheeky monkey" in a forlorn voice. We have no idea what this meant -- she loves monkeys, so maybe the monkey in question was a victim rather than an antagonist. Then again, it does sound a bit like what you'd call an evil monkey in a horror film. I don't know if Anya's scared of cheeky monkey, but I think I am...

Weird stuff on immigration forms

Look closely and you can see a requirement to declare swordsticks before entering Fiji. Luckily there's nothing banning the case of grenades I had in my luggage. But I think Raffles the Gentleman Thief will find it hard going in this country.

Don't know why, there's no sun up in the sky...

Last night was stormy. The news is reporting 120km winds and beaches all but swept away by pounding tides along the coast. At work during the afternoon, our view of the harbour gradually darkened until you could barely see the Opera House, five minutes' walk away. The rain came down in drenching gusts, swelling the gutters till you couldn't cross the street.

Anya was a bit unsettled by this, as it rattled her windows and boomed in her chimney for much of the night. Jasper too was running around with his hair on end, quite uncertain what to do about everything. This morning, walking to the station, I saw a eucalyptus branch some 4 metres long lying in a churchyard. In my cursory look, I couldn't see any evidence nearby of the tree it had come from.

Living in Australia you're really aware of how mild most British weather is. I remember as a standout event of my childhood the day it rained so hard that the gutters overflowed the road. I think I still have a photo somewhere of child-me, standing in the water in wellies and a raincoat. That sort of event happens several times a year in Sydney. Likewise with storms: Britain still remembers the great storm of 1987; I think it has its own, quite comprehensive, Wikipedia page. And I'd guess it wasn't much more severe than last night's storm in Sydney, which we'll all have forgotten by the weekend.

The bedtime ritual

"Here's how it goes down.

"We eat our dinner. We have a bath. This is important--when dad tried to skip the bath on Sunday because we'd got home late from the shops, I had to correct him by saying: "Need bathtime!"

"In the bath, we do experiments mostly focusing on the physics of buoyancy and viscosity. Buoyancy: pour water into the hull of our toy boat. After a certain point, the boat is observed to sink. Viscosity: get dad to wind up the paddling turtle toy. When it's swimming, remove the toy from the water. As they are removed, a speeding up of the paddles is observed.

"After this we drink warm milk from our sippy cup and sit on someone's lap wrapped in a towel. We may play "this little piggy" at this point. Mum or dad will try to clean my teeth. This is not to be tolerated, although I will consent to suck the minty paste off the brush. Then, I get into my bedtime clothes and we go to my room.

"Once there, we read two or three stories while we listen to my musical bedtime seahorse. I have to kiss all the zebras on the carpet, my rocking horse, and the horse on the back of the door. And mum or dad lay me in bed and kiss me goodnight. Sometimes I throw a toy out of the cot and call out, "Where's bunny gone?" to check they're paying attention. So far they've always come in."

I remember about a year ago reading about now you have to establish a bedtime ritual to help your toddler get to sleep. This alarmed me a bit. I've never designed a ritual before. Would it need to involve chanting? Chicken sacrifice?

Well I needn't have worried. As you can see, we have a pretty complex bedtime ritual but I can't remember Kate and I ever sitting down with a blank sheet of paper to work out what it should be. And it's not that Anya's come up with it all, either. We've really worked it out together, as a collaborative process. Which is probably why it feels so good.

Whiskits!

It's been a while since I posted a "the things they say" type of post. And of course Anya's verbal abilities have been running ahead by leaps and bounds. We have now essentially moved on from her being preverbal, with occasional phrases or words she can say properly. These days the dialogue between Anya and us is basically a true conversation, although we still don't understand everything she's saying (and vice versa, I'm sure) and there's presumably some things she'd like to talk about but doesn't have the words to express.

Of course most of this actual dialogue consists of us asking if she wants x or y and her pointing stuff out and expressing some fairly rote views of it: "Jasper scared", or "Jasper no biting", or "more mato" (tomato). Then again, a sizeable chunk of conversation between Brits and Aussies probably consists of a half-dozen standard comments about the weather, so I'm not sure how much her limited conversational repertoire matters.

Another one we've been hearing a lot is "want whiskits". She loves Weetbix (Weetabix, as they're known in the UK) and I think their crunchy qualiy makes them think they should be some sort of biscuit. So, whiskits. I try to ignore the fact that this sounds like catfood. I think the knowledge might spoil her breakfast.

One other I want to write down and remember: in the bath on Saturday, she grabbed a water jug and addressed a bobbing duck toy: "Close eyes duckie!" This is of course exactly what we say (minus the duckie) when we wet her hair to wash it, and sure enough she proceeded to pour the water all over duckie's head.

The thing that continues to amaze me about this is that it's all imitation. Language -- this mysterious and complex ability that is more or less the best demarcator of what makes us human rather than animal, this phenomenon that continues to baffle philosophers and neurologists -- is to her a fun game, part of her imitative love of repeating adult behaviours. It's a reminder to me that we're creatures of play as much as reason, and of doing as much as of thinking.